Many of the world’s most expensive perfumes begin with a wounded tree. When some Aquilaria trees are damaged, they produce a dark, fragrant resin that becomes agarwood, or oudh – an ingredient so valuable that wild trees have been illegally felled in its pursuit. The result has devastated wild Aquilaria populations.
But what if perfumers could create the smell without cutting down the tree? With the help of AI, scientists are learning to predict how molecules that have never been made will smell, reconstructing scent-producing genes from flowers believed to be extinct. Others have collected microbes from clouds and used them as a starting point for new perfumes.
Now scientists and biotechnology companies say advances could soon allow the fragrance industry to reproduce scents and compounds from endangered plants without repeatedly harvesting them. Osmo has recreated the scent of a rare tree from a piece of bark “the size of a finger”, Wiltschko said. A spectrometer analysed the sample, its AI reconstructed the chemical formula and the scent was reproduced in its laboratory.
BioHarvest Sciences says it has created a stable cell culture from an endangered south-east Asian fragrance plant, allowing its valuable compounds to be produced without cultivating or harvesting the original plant. The plant has not been named for commercial reasons but BioHarvest has announced an agreement anticipating production of 20 tonnes of the fragrance composition, with limited production potentially beginning next year. Rhian Smith, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, agreed.
She pointed to the Aquilaria tree. AI could help design an alternative to oudh, she said, but wild-sourced material remained highly prized. There is also the question of motivation.
Wiltschko admitted that conservation was not “an explicit priority” for Osmo’s work. Synthetic perfume itself is nothing new: the industry has relied heavily on synthetic ingredients for more than a century, and machines have long been able to identify molecules in a scent. Elsewhere, AI is claimed to be changing the whole world in which perfumers work.
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